In taxonomy, Homo sapiens is the only extant human species. The name is Latin for "wiseman" and was introduced in 1758 by Carl Linnaeus (who is himself also the type specimen).

Extinct species of the genus Homo include Homo erectus, extant during roughly 1.9 to 0.4 million years ago, and a number of other species (by some authors considered subspecies of either H. sapiens or H. erectus). H. sapiens idaltu (2003) is a proposed extinct subspecies of H. sapiens.

The age of speciation of H. sapiens out of ancestral H. erectus (or an intermediate species such as Homo antecessor) is estimated to have been roughly 315,000 years ago. Sustained archaic admixture is known to have taken place both in Africa and (following the recent Out-Of-Africa expansion) in Eurasia, between about 100,000 and 30,000 years ago.

The term anatomically modern humans (AMH) is used to distinguish H. sapiens having an anatomy consistent with the range of phenotypes seen in contemporary humans from varieties of extinct archaic humans. This is useful especially for times and regions where anatomically modern and archaic humans co-existed, for example, in Paleolithic Europe.

Broiler chicken, proposed by scientists in 2018 as the symbol for the Anthropocene Era, the current era when human modification of the environment has changed the planet. The chicken is the most populous bird on Earth, thanks to their breeding for food by humans.